Sinatra

by Anthony Summers

  For all the talk of Davis’s devotion and Frank’s steadfast support, theirs was a fragile relationship. Two years earlier, when a scandal magazine hinted that Davis had dallied with Ava Gardner, Frank had been furious until Ava assured him that the story was baseless. Once, shown a photograph of himself seated beside another of Frank’s women, Cindy Bitterman, Davis tore the print in half to obliterate Bitterman’s face. He was afraid of what Frank might do if he saw the photograph.

  “Talent,” Davis would say in a 1959 radio interview, “is not an excuse for bad manners. I love Frank but there are many things he does that there is no excuse for. I don’t care if you are the most talented person in the world. It does not give you the right to step on people and treat them rotten. This is what he does occasionally. . . . I think it’s inexcusable.”

  Frank retaliated by severing relations with Davis and ensuring that he was dropped from a forthcoming movie. Months later, after Davis apologized publicly during a charity performance, he and Frank embraced in front of the audience in a display that Dean Martin thought “disgusting.” Davis was restored to the status of “Charley,” the Sinatra set’s catch-all name for a pal, and remained close to Frank for years to come.

  PETER LAWFORD, “Charley the Seal” to Frank until they fell out, once described himself as “a halfway decent-looking English boy who looked nice in a drawing-room standing by a piano.” He had been born in 1928 into London “society,” and brought to the United States as a teenager. His father, a retired British lieutenant general, had been knighted for heroism in World War I. His mother, the daughter of landed gentry, was an unhappy woman who considered the birth of her son “an awful accident.”

  If she had to have a child, Lady Lawford said, she would have preferred a daughter. Like Frank’s mother, she dressed her son in girl’s clothing in infancy, and continued to do so until he was eleven. He was educated by governesses, one of whom sexually abused him at the age of ten. Early on, he announced to his parents that he did not want to follow in his father’s footsteps and go to military college. He wanted to become an actor, a notion his mother encouraged.

  In England, where he appeared in a movie at the age of eight, a newspaper declared Lawford “Britain’s Jackie Coogan.” When his mother took him to Hollywood, in his early teens, his English accent and good looks landed him a role alongside Mickey Rooney. Then after several difficult years—his parents’ finances collapsed—came a bit part as a young English flier in Mrs. Miniver, the hit movie about London in the Blitz. Another war movie appearance won him a contract at MGM.

  Lawford, now described as a “well-hewn god . . . six-foot . . . devilish blue eyes,” spent as much time as he could at the beach. He socialized with the stars, including some of the women in Sinatra’s constellation—Marilyn Maxwell, Lana Turner, with whom he had an affair, and even Ava Gardner.

  Lawford first met Frank at an MGM party in 1944, when he was twenty-one and Frank and Nancy had just moved to Hollywood. He went to parties at their home, good-humoredly took part in skits that played up his lack of money compared to the wealth of other guests.

  Two years later, when cast with Frank in It Happened in Brooklyn— Lawford played an English aristocrat—he spoke in an interview of Sinatra’s “singular temper.” The anger could last for a long time, as he soon discovered. In 1954, after Frank’s breakup with Ava, the press reported that she and Lawford had met for a “date.” It had been no more than a get-together with friends, according to the actor and his manager, who was present, but Frank would have none of it.

  “I was in bed at three in the morning,” Lawford recalled, “and the telephone rings. Then comes a voice at the other end of the telephone. . . . ‘What’s this about you and Ava? Listen, creep. You wanna stay healthy? I’ll have your legs broken, you bum. If I hear anything more about this, with Ava, you’ve had it.’ ”

  Three years passed before Frank spoke with or saw Lawford or appeared in public with him. Then in 1957, sometime after Lawford had married Patricia Kennedy, a sister of Senator John F. Kennedy, they met at a dinner party and resumed the relationship as though there had never been a rift. Frank and Lawford would soon be doing a song-and-dance routine on Dinah Shore’s TV show, then go on to appear together in movies, and even become partners in the restaurant business. They caroused together on trips to England, Monaco, and Italy. When they were drunk together in a hotel suite in Rome, Frank did something uncharacteristic. “He looked up,” Lawford remembered, “and said: ‘Charley, I’m . . . ah . . . sorry.’ Frank was finally apologizing for that tantrum over the Ava business.”

  Lawford began enthusing about Frank to anyone who would listen. Like Sammy Davis Jr. before him, some thought, he even aped Frank’s style and mannerisms. “This is such an enormous talent,” he told a reporter. Frank had “some kind of magic that a lot of us wish we had. . . . I consider it a privilege to live in the same era Frank’s in. I do. I think he’s a giant; a fantastic human being.”

  THE IMPROBABLE BIRTHPLACE of the Sinatra Rat Pack was Madison, Indiana, population: 10,500, a “typical American town” according to the World War II Office of War Information. It had once been a boom-town, but the days of prosperity were long gone in August 1958, when Frank roared into town. He was there to make the movie Some Came Running, based on a new James Jones novel.

  The movie tells the story of a whiskey-swilling army veteran and would-be writer, Frank’s character, who returns to his hometown after a long absence. Dean Martin co-stars as another heavy drinker, a professional gambler. Shirley MacLaine plays a sweet but simple floozie who falls for the army veteran and dies tragically in the last reel. The misbegotten trio contrast sharply with the dull, decent people of the little town in which the story is set. So it was, in real life. Frank and his entourage brought to the people of Madison not only excitement and a welcome cascade of dollars, but also insulting, boorish behavior—most of it ascribed to Frank.

  He mocked locals, believing no one who cared was listening: “Hiya, you ugly old bag. . . . Hello there, hillbilly. . . . Drop dead, ya fink.” He imported “pleasure girls” and drank heavily. He ripped a telephone out of the wall because he thought the operator was listening in on his calls. He was said to have smashed a TV screen with a beer bottle. Worst of all, he physically assaulted John Byam, a sixty-seven-year-old hotel clerk, after someone in Frank’s party complained about slow service. “Mr. Sinatra grabbed me by the shirt front and began shoving me around the room . . . yelling at me. . . . He finally let me go and I sat down at my desk and began crying.” The clerk stayed away from work for several days.

  MacLaine, for whom the movie was a marvelous break, had regular access to the house Frank and Martin rented during the shoot. “I was the mascot,” she said. “I would clean up the house, make them cappuccinos, and answer the door . . . they wouldn’t let any other woman in the house.” She watched, fascinated, as the pair splashed on cologne, primped to go out in their fine suits, selected smart ties, and donned wide-brimmed hats right out of the racetrack number from Guys and Dolls. She looked on wide-eyed as they slipped $100 tips to bellboys.

  Frank and Martin separately came knocking at MacLaine’s hotel room door, but she felt they were just going through the motions. “Neither of them ever put the make on me. It was acknowledged that I was not going to do that, and if anyone else tried, he was toast. I was the ‘little girl’/‘mother,’ and they did not cross those lines.” Later, as she watched their involvements with women, she wondered whether either man saw women as “real beings with needs and intelligence. Did they ever communicate on a fulfilling level?”

  Frank and Martin, MacLaine noticed, “could dislike people because of small things that personally offended them. They couldn’t overcome their judgment of a person’s teeth or smell. They’d make jokes under their breath . . . cast someone out of their lives because his jockstrap showed under his shorts.”

  She saw these grown men stuff crackers in each other’s beds, throw spaghetti ov
er a man’s tuxedo, give an admirer an ice cube and tell him to skate on it. Though MacLaine came to like much about them, even eventually took a shine to Martin, she thought them “primitive children.” Although Frank treated her well, she noticed how rude, cruel even, he could be to others. He seemed never to weigh the consequences of his actions, never to her knowledge admitted he was wrong, and “demanded total loyalty without deviation.” He “had to live in a world he created in order to control it,” MacLaine thought, “and his talent and street-smart shrewdness enabled him to get away with it.”

  Frank’s behavior during the making of Some Came Running attracted national attention. “A Life magazine reporter came down to interview us,” MacLaine remembered. “We wouldn’t talk to him—and because we were never apart he dubbed us The Clan.”

  For a while, that was the name that stuck. They were not yet the Rat Pack, but the Life story gave the group an identity in the public mind: “Nonconformity is now the key to social importance,” Paul O’Neil wrote in the magazine. “That Angry Middle-aged Man, Frank Sinatra, is its prophet—and the reigning social monarch. . . . But only the clan (composed of those on whom Frank smiles) REALLY MATTERS. . . . Today there is no Frank but Frank. . . . As paramount chieftain and head witch doctor of the clan Frank personifies its nonconformist attitude: a public and aggressive indifference. . . . He is known, variously, among the faithful as The Pope, The General or The Dago.”

  Frank’s close associates, O’Neil noted, were mostly forty or older. They lived or hoped to live in homes that cost $250,000, a sizable sum then. They bought seersucker jackets from a classy tailor who supplied, for $125, what New Yorkers could buy elsewhere for $29. Several of them drove Dual-Ghias, racy Italian automobiles powered by Dodge engines. They gave each other pricey gifts ranging from inscribed silverware to personalized bedroom slippers. Frank’s secretary, readers were told, often summoned the Clan’s “appointed ones” to his house on short notice. There they would sing, play their own music to each other, view movies, and play poker.

  Sammy Davis was the only member of the group quoted in Life, and some suspected he was the magazine’s principal source. Later, he said the cult of personality, Frank’s personality, had been paramount. “He was our leader,” Davis recalled. “Nobody did it like Frank. Nobody dared.”

  The group’s members eventually disowned the label Clan, not least because it sounded too much like Klan. They became instead the Rat Pack, once described by Davis as “just a group of clean, wholesome, ordinary guys who meet once a year to take over the world.” To that end, they had their own lingo and their own jokey patter.

  Pressed by the humorist Art Buchwald, Frank offered these definitions of Ratpackspeak:

  gas: a good situation, as in “a gas of a weekend.”

  clyde: a catch-all for whatever you want it to mean. As in “Pass the clyde” when you want the salt, “I have to go to the clyde” when you mean “party,” or “I don’t like her clyde” when you mean “voice.”

  bunter: the opposite of a gasser . . . a nowhere.

  cool: expression of admiration or approval.

  crazy: similar to “cool.”

  Harvey: a square. A Harvey, or Harv, is the typical tourist who goes into a French restaurant and says, “What’s ready?”

  Many of the other words in the Rat Pack lexicon focused on sex: “bird”—for the genitals, male or female, but more often the former; “quim”—dated English slang for vagina, probably a Lawford contribution; “charlies”—when not applied to a pal, could do double duty and refer to a fine pair of breasts. “Mother,” as in “motherfucker,” was used often. “I’m not a prude,” the singer Keely Smith once said, alluding to an affair she had with Frank during those years, “but that’s one of the reasons I never married Frank, because of the language in that group. . . . I knew I couldn’t raise my kids around that.”

  The way the Rat Pack performed in public in early 1960, though, endowed Frank and his gang, almost overnight, with the status of national icons.

  THE SHOWS THEY STAGED that year at the Sands in Las Vegas were billed as “The Summit,” a name casino boss Jack Entratter took from the press shorthand for the meeting of American, Soviet, British, and French leaders planned for the spring. Entratter had sent off a series of spoof telegrams of which one, signed “Khrushchev” and addressed to the Sinatra group, read: “You come to my summit meeting and I’ll come to yours.”

  In just four weeks, some 34,000 people came to the Sands to see the Rat Pack’s shows. People offered $100 for tickets priced at $3. The Pack, Robert Legare wrote in Playboy, embodied “a wild iconoclasm that millions envy secretly or even unconsciously—which makes them, in the public eye, the innest in-group in the world.” More recently, having watched an old kinescope of the Sinatra group at work, the journalist James Wolcott described the Rat Pack as “the Mount Rushmore of men having fun.”

  The pack’s show consisted of singing and dancing—mostly Davis’s— and slapstick humor. In one running joke, the man in the spotlight would be interrupted by one of those waiting in the wings. “Hey, where the hell’s the toilet back here?” Dean Martin would say off stage. “I gotta go real bad.” Soon, on stage, Joey Bishop would ask, “Dean, close the bathroom door.” Two Rat Pack members would march into view, in their undershorts but wearing tuxedo shirts and jackets and with their pants over their arms. Thousands of people found this funny.

  Being drunk, and making cracks about being drunk, was supposed to be hilarious. “Here they are, folks,” Joey Bishop would say as Martin entered with Frank, “Haig and Vague.” “Breakfast,” Martin mumbled, as Frank rolled on stage a portable bar laden with booze. Martin, playing the drunk as always, would feign swilling Scotch from an ice bucket and exhort the audience to “buy a copy of my new book, ‘The Power of Positive Drinking.’ ”

  Davis was to call Martin “the only cold-sober lush in show business,” and say he rarely consumed real alcohol on stage. However, Ed Walters, a Sands pit boss, said, “They were all really drinking on stage, except Joey.” The shows, one columnist cheerfully observed, were “a glorification of the American alcoholic.” “Drinking a great deal was a prerequisite for being a Clan member,” Davis said.

  As the civil rights movement gathered momentum, the Rat Pack joked about race. Davis was ridiculed and ridiculed himself, to positive effect. “ You wanna dance with me?” Davis would ask Lawford. “Do you realize I happen to be one of the greatest Jewish Mau Mau dancers?” To which Lawford replied, “I’m not prejudiced.” Davis: “I know your kind. You’ll dance with me. But you won’t go to school with me.”

  Sometimes the humor crossed a line. “I’ll dance wit’ ya,” Martin told Davis, “I’ll sing wit’ ya, I’ll swim wit’ ya, I’ll cut the lawn wit’ ya, I’ll go to bar mitzvahs wit’ ya but”—this as the black man put a friendly hand on his shoulder—“don’t touch me.” Such cracks could be hurtful, Davis admitted years later. He went along with them because the Pack was a rainbow group—two Italian-Americans, a black man, a Jew (Bishop), and a sometime Englishman (Lawford)—and they were making a point.

  Frank and Martin slipped in myriad sex jokes, sometimes by mangling the lyrics of familiar songs. “You made me love you, I didn’t wanna do it, I didn’t wanna do it” became, “You made me love you, You woke me up to do it.” A line in “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” “Nothing could be finer than to have your ham an’ eggs in Carolina” might come out as, “Nothing could be finer than to shack up with a minor.”

  During the day, the five men worked on location shooting the movie Ocean’s 11, the story of a group of war veterans who plot simultaneous robberies of five Las Vegas casinos. Afternoons, they repaired to what became known as their “Clubhouse,” the steam room and health club next to the pool at the Sands. There they lolled in white robes monogrammed either with their initials—FAS for Frank—or their nicknames: DAG, as in Dago, for Martin, and SON OF A GUN for Bishop, because that was one of his trademark phrases. Frank
once arranged for Davis to be issued a brown robe, brown towels, and brown soap.

  Women were on tap in the Clubhouse. “I went, took off my clothes, and walked in,” Kirk Douglas recalled. “Sitting next to me in the mist was a beautiful naked girl. We chatted for about ten minutes. When I came out the ‘boys’ were watching me. . . . I said, ‘That’s a real nice guy in there.’ ”

  Paul Anka never forgot an early experience in Vegas. “I was like eighteen or nineteen—they wouldn’t even let me in the casino. . . . I meet Sinatra and the guys, and they hang out. The greatest times I ever had were in that steam room. Everything went on in there that you could imagine. . . . The women who were around all the time! Not only were they good-looking but they knew what they were doing. . . . If you wanted to get laid—and really get laid—that’s where you could get laid.”

  “The place was crawling with the most gorgeous girls,” said Henry Silva, who played a gangster in Ocean’s 11 and attended all “The Summit” shows. “These women . . . would stick their key in your pocket and say, ‘Come on up to Room whatever, I’ll be there, I’ll be bathed, I’ll take care of you, make love to you like you’ve never been made love to before.’ You could have two or three girls at the same time.”

  “There were poker games in the massage room,” said Count Guido Deiro, a casino dealer. “A big table with five, six guys with towels around them, and women under the table giving oral sex.”

  “When Dean came to town,” pit boss Ed Walters said, “the cocktail waitresses fought to see who would give him a blowjob.” Entratter sometimes sent the best of the new showgirls to Frank’s suite, George Jacobs said, as an “on-the-house nightcap.”